2 Home PC's Working together ?

[Trimble Bracegirdle]

I'm just building a new Core 2 Duo machine.. my current 3 year old P4 3.2
Ghz 1.5 Gig DDR
Dual Chan. Memory ...various Hard drives 200 Gb plus ..
Because of the changes in standards ...AGP to PCI-E ....DDR to DDR2 ...PATA
IDE to SATA ..
I am not able use much of the existing machine so It will be kept as (yet
another)
backup machine...I will use its HD's for back up.

I have a single user Home Type Pc situation ..play lots of current
Games...watch TV & DVD films
on the PC ...lots of Internet use .
I'm wondering if there is a useful way to connect the 2 Comps. together so
as to boost the performance of the one I will actually be sitting in front
of..

I've never had to get into the Horrors of Network Connection & don't really
want to
...so I got a USB2 to USB2 'Bridge' cable which will connect the PC's.
I believe I can configure that so the main machine 'sees' the other as a
Drive Letter ..
Sooo ! I could put the Swapfile Down that USB2 link to Old PC's main memory
..?.
& perhaps view Old PC as a Hard Disk with vast amounts of Cache .
I'm quite impressed with the ReadyBoost feature in VISTA & wondering re.
connecting
to my Old PC in this way..
Any ideas ...perhaps USB2 links are to slow for my ideas..
BUT all that 1.5 gigs PC3200 DDR Memory with next to nothing to do ???
Mouse
@@@

 

[Paul]

I'm just building a new Core 2 Duo machine.. my current 3 year old P4 3.2
Ghz 1.5 Gig DDR
Dual Chan. Memory ...various Hard drives 200 Gb plus ..
Because of the changes in standards ...AGP to PCI-E ....DDR to DDR2 ...PATA
IDE to SATA ..
I am not able use much of the existing machine so It will be kept as (yet
another)
backup machine...I will use its HD's for back up.

I have a single user Home Type Pc situation ..play lots of current
Games...watch TV & DVD films
on the PC ...lots of Internet use .
I'm wondering if there is a useful way to connect the 2 Comps. together so
as to boost the performance of the one I will actually be sitting in front
of..

I've never had to get into the Horrors of Network Connection & don't really
want to
..so I got a USB2 to USB2 'Bridge' cable which will connect the PC's.
I believe I can configure that so the main machine 'sees' the other as a
Drive Letter ..
Sooo ! I could put the Swapfile Down that USB2 link to Old PC's main memory
.?.
& perhaps view Old PC as a Hard Disk with vast amounts of Cache .
I'm quite impressed with the ReadyBoost feature in VISTA & wondering re.
connecting
to my Old PC in this way..
Any ideas ...perhaps USB2 links are to slow for my ideas..
BUT all that 1.5 gigs PC3200 DDR Memory with next to nothing to do ???
Mouse
@@@

Simple Windows file sharing, and a KVM, are all you need to get some
usage from two machines. If you are rendering some kind of multimedia
content, you could flip to one machine, and start the job running, then
flip over to your second machine, and play some games. That is a lot
simpler than looking for some clustering software or some kind of application
that deals out tasks to multiple machines.

Paul

 

[John Weiss]

I've never had to get into the Horrors of Network Connection & don't
really want to
..so I got a USB2 to USB2 'Bridge' cable which will connect the PC's.
I believe I can configure that so the main machine 'sees' the other as a
Drive Letter ..
Sooo ! I could put the Swapfile Down that USB2 link to Old PC's main
memory .?.

I don't think so. AFAIK, the swap file can only go on a fixed disk
physically attached to the machine. Network and USB drives can't play.

& perhaps view Old PC as a Hard Disk with vast amounts of Cache .
I'm quite impressed with the ReadyBoost feature in VISTA & wondering re.
connecting to my Old PC in this way..

Vista may be different, but previous MS OSes don't allow either of those.

Any ideas ...perhaps USB2 links are to slow for my ideas..

They are allegedly 400+ Mbps, but much slower in reality. Firewire is
faster in the real world, though spec'ed slightly slower.

BUT all that 1.5 gigs PC3200 DDR Memory with next to nothing to do ???

Put it to use in a distributed computing project:
http://folding.stanford.edu